Plasma display apparatuses have advantages of being able to be thinned and to have larger screens. An AC plasma display panel used in such a plasma display apparatus is such that a front plate made of a glass substrate and formed by arraying a plurality of rows of scan electrodes and sustain electrodes for carrying out surface discharges, and a back plate on which data electrodes are arrayed in a plurality of rows are so combined that the scan electrodes and the sustain electrodes are orthogonal to the data electrodes, thereby forming matrix-shaped discharge cells, as disclosed, for example, in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2001-195990.
A subfield method for displaying a halftone by temporally overlapping a plurality of weighted binary images is known as a method for driving the plasma display panel constructed as above. According to this subfield method, one field is temporally divided into a plurality of subfields, which are respectively weighted. The weights of the respective subfields correspond to emission amounts of the subfields. For example, the numbers of emissions are used as the weights, and a total amount of the weights of the respective subfields corresponds to the luminance, i.e. gradation level of a video signal.
Each subfield is comprised of a set-up period, an address period and a sustain period, wherein wall charges of the respective electrodes are adjusted during the set-up period, write discharges are generated between the data electrodes and the scan electrodes during the address period, and only the discharge cells where the write discharges were generated carry out sustain discharges between the scan electrodes and the sustain electrodes. The number of emissions by the sustain discharges becomes the weight of the subfield, and various video images are displayed in gradation at a luminance corresponding to the number of emissions.
However, in the above AC plasma display panel, strong write discharges are generated between the data electrodes and the scan electrodes forming the discharge cells in order to generate stable sustain discharges, and strong discharges occur between the scan electrodes and the sustain electrodes of the discharge cells during these write discharges. Error discharges occur between the scan electrodes and the sustain electrodes of the adjacent discharge cells by these strong discharges, whereby crosstalk occurs between adjacent lines to deteriorate the quality of the display image. Further, since the light emissions by the strong write discharges becomes unnecessary lights, a black luminance in the absence of signals cannot be sufficiently depressed, thereby deteriorating the quality of the display image.